Ending a Marriage Without Tearing Up the Kids : Seminars offered by the Divorce Education & Family Counseling Center in Santa Ana teach parents how to help their children and not use them as tools in their breakup.

Your 4-year-old has gone back to bed wetting and baby talk and your third-grader has started bringing home Cs and Ds instead of A’s and Bs.

You know these are reactions to the divorce that call for extra attention and reassurance from you, but the breakup of your marriage has left you as unsettled and needy as the children. Sometimes you wish you could be the one to have a temper tantrum--or just curl up with your favorite blanket and cry--and you feel cheated when your kids preempt you.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. The needs of parents and children often collide when a family is going through a divorce. But, psychologists say, the children who deal best with divorce are the ones whose parents are able to rise above their own pain long enough to make sure their offspring are getting the understanding and support they need.

Parents who participate in the seminars offered by the Divorce Education & Family Counseling Center in Santa Ana quickly learn that they have to get past their bitterness toward each other before they can help their kids.

During a recent seminar at the Santa Ana center, Mary Alice Bastian and Barbara Files--both marriage, family and child counselors--talked about the games parents play that make divorce more difficult for their children than it has to be.

Blame is a common weapon ex-spouses use against each other in post-marital battles--always at the expense of the children, Bastian says.

“There are many reasons why people divorce, and both parents are equally at fault,” she observes. “To make one parent wrong is very unfair to a child.”

Parents are also being unfair when they compete for their children’s love by showering them with gifts or constantly putting each other down, Files adds.

“They should both want the children to have a good relationship with each parent,” she says.

Instead, some couples use their children in ways that make them feel disloyal. For example, they may ask them to carry messages back and forth or make spies out of them by asking far too many probing questions about their ex-spouse’s new life.

“Involving the children in the conflict between the parents is very damaging,” Bastian cautions.

Files advises couples to shift from a marital to a business relationship after divorce so they can communicate directly with each other instead of using their children as go-betweens.

And when talking to your ex-spouse--especially in front of the children--she suggests: “Detach yourself as much as you can from past ways of interacting. Concentrate on what the problem is, not who caused it. And don’t approach it when you’re so boiling mad that you’re ready to explode. Make sure you can be civil with each other, and end the conversation when it starts to go bad.”

Regardless of the type of custody arrangement parents work out, their goal should be to free their children from exposure to chronic conflict, says Zena Polly, an Irvine psychologist who leads workshops on how to help children adjust to divorce.

Children feel helpless, she explains, when their parents subject them to “underlying, pervasive tension that has no clear beginning or resolution.”

She says she has seen a “slight retreat” from joint custody because research has shown that, in cases in which the parents are openly hostile toward each other, such as arrangement just exposes the children to more conflict.

Richard, a 49-year-old Orange County resident whose marriage broke up about two years ago, worries about the hostility that lingers with his ex-wife.

“We have both been told (by counselors) that our attitude toward each other is the single most important thing standing in the way of us raising three well-adjusted children,” he says.

Richard, who asked for anonymity, and his ex-wife have joint custody of the children, ages 3, 5 and 7. The parents live just a few miles apart, and the children’s time is divided evenly between the two homes--one week with mom, the next with dad.

The children have bedrooms, toys and all the clothes they need--including shoes--at each house. When they go from one parent to another, they just bring the backpacks and lunch boxes they take to school. Richard’s weeks begin on Friday afternoons when he takes the children home from school, an arrangement that minimizes contact with his ex-wife, who has remarried.

“It keeps the tension down,” Richard says. “There’s less chance of arguing in front of the kids.”

Richard wanted joint custody so that his children would still have two full-time parents after the divorce--and he wouldn’t become a “Disneyland dad.”

“They are never ‘visiting’ the less important parent,” he notes.

On his weeks with the children, he has his hands full because all three youngsters have had difficulties adjusting to the divorce.

His 5-year-old daughter, for example, still thinks of her parents as a couple.

“She always talks about ‘Mommy and Daddy.’ And there’s no way you can give her enough attention,” he says.

His youngest son was kicked out of preschool not long ago because he turned a teacher’s office into a disaster area--a reaction, Richard believes, to having his stepfather pick him up from school the day before when he was expecting one of his parents.

“He felt abandoned by both of us,” Richard says.

He hopes someday he and his ex-wife will be able to talk to each other about incidents like this as well as more routine matters related to the children.

“We don’t need to be friends,” he says. “We just need to stop being enemies.”

Pat Young, a 49-year-old Laguna Niguel resident, has been able to remain friends with her ex-husband so they can be “co-parents” for their 10-year-old daughter, Megan.

From the beginning, they worked together to ease their daughter’s pain. They decided both of them should be there when she was told they were going to separate nearly three years ago.

“We emphasized that she would see her dad often and that he was not leaving her,” Young says.

On the first night her dad was gone, Megan was distraught because she didn’t have “anything that dad had given me.” The next day, Young called Megan’s father and arranged an outing so that he could buy her a stuffed animal. Now “Cinnamon” is Megan’s companion on every trip she takes without her dad.

Megan sees her father, who lives just a mile away, two nights a week and every other weekend, but Young says they allow for changes in that routine to meet their daughter’s needs.

She says both she and her ex-husband have tried to help Megan understand that she will probably always have fantasies about her parents getting back together--and that they will never come true. At the same time, they keep reassuring her “that we are both near for you.”

Young also felt it was important to be open with her daughter about her own pain over the divorce. Vicky Ziniti, a 46-year-old Irvine resident who has been divorced nearly five years, wishes she and her ex-husband had understood that earlier.

“We never showed any of our unhappiness, so our children experienced no relief as a result of the breakup,” she says. “They couldn’t understand why it was happening.”

However, like the Youngs, Ziniti and her ex-husband were able to reassure their two daughters, now ages 8 and 12, that their father would be nearby--just seven miles away--and they would see him often. Ziniti says it also helped them to have toys at their dad’s house, where they spend one night a week and every other weekend.

Ziniti has decided to put off relocating to another area because it’s so important to her that her children be near their father. Both girls seem to be thriving now in spite of the divorce; they do well in school and lead busy, happy lives, she says.

“I don’t think they feel torn between us. They know we both love them and aren’t vying for favoritism.”

Both Young and Ziniti and their ex-husbands have managed to provide what Zena Polly, the Irvine psychologist, calls “cooperative parenting.” She says many couples who remain in conflict after the divorce end up doing “parallel parenting”--in two nurturing but completely separate households.

It’s better for the children, she says, when there are no rigid boundaries between households and they can see that, when it comes to the important things in their lives, their parents are still a team.

Divorce is always a big loss for children, but there can be gains, too, Polly says.

For example, she explains, the process of divorce can teach children the importance of resolving problems and being sensitive to the feelings of others. And after the divorce, “when their parents are less depressed and happier with themselves, the children have a more positive role model.”